Why We Are Swooning Over the Comeback of the Sexy Button Fly

There’s something eternally cool about the button fly. Every second it takes to slide a metal button through a tough, coarse loop harkens back to days of chilled-out James Dean types with thumbs in sturdy pockets, the era of gold-rush hopefuls who owned the same well-worn pairs of Levi’s for decades, or even Kate Moss, in all of her slouchy-chic glory, posing in a pair of thick Calvin Klein boot-cut jeans. Unlike the quick-and-easy motions of a zipper, the button fly evokes a nostalgic feeling of hand-sewn quality and personalized effort—something that has fallen to the wayside in an age of stretchy skinny jeans made with materials that could never handle the rough-and-tough structure of a button closure.

Apart from its connotation of high quality, the button fly retains an undeniable sexiness—reviving the grainy Levi’s 501s commercials that touted the idea that one should “Live Unbuttoned,” with highly zoomed-in shots of low-slung waistbands and cheeky crotch shots of pretty young things with skyrocketing hormones ever so slowly unbuttoning their jeans. Back in the nineties there was a slew of banned Levi’s 501 clips, one in particular that shows a woman on the run, changing in front of a blind man in the bathroom, and undoing her jeans, the punchline being that the man is not actually, in fact, visually impaired. Another commercial compares unbuttoning Levi’s 501s to couples losing their virginity. Fast-forward to the duo’s jeans hitting the ground “for the very first time” (spoiler alert! They’re actually jumping off a bridge into an ocean!). In each commercial, the camera is fixated on the fly’s slow, seductive unbuttoning.

Sometimes a throwback initiates a comeback and now, it seems, the button fly has indeed. For its fall 2015 presentation, Visvim showed a collection of wear-forever, workwear-inspired denim in which every single rivet and wash was highly produced. It’s no surprise that their complementing detail was the meticulous, and swoon-worthy application of the button fly. “With retro revisitations of seventies denim styles also come thought-out details from their glory,” says Vogue Denim Editor Kelly Connor. “It’s thicker, sturdier—a button fly is something that embodies the quality, more-hands-on process of denim from those years.” It’s not just Visvim, either. The button fly has popped up in recent collaborations like Alexa Chung x AG Jeans and Candice Swanepoel x Mother—with Chung and Swanepoel both vocalizing how much they enjoyed the old-school button fly in their high-waisted jeans or miniskirts. It’s further proof, that yes, time may fly, but the button fly is here to stay—one button at a time.